Apple unveiled the first touchscreen MacBook Pro on Wednesday, reversing a decades-long design stance. The 14-inch model starts at $2,899 and goes on sale November 6, as the company bets software and developer support will make the feature stick.
Apple on Wednesday unveiled its first laptop equipped with a touchscreen display, ending a position the company had maintained for decades while competitors shipped touch-enabled Windows machines. The new model, called the MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR Display, goes on sale November 6.
"Yes, for the very first time, we are bringing touch to the Mac," CEO John Ternus said in live remarks to media and analysts in Los Angeles.
The 14-inch model starts at $2,899, and the 16-inch version starts at $3,399 — both representing notable price increases over existing MacBook Pro models. The laptops run on Apple's M5 Pro or M5 Max chips and feature an OLED panel that Apple says offers higher brightness, wider color reproduction, and broader viewing angles than current displays. Apple also described the new machine as lighter than its existing pro laptops. The device retains macOS and does not run a version of iPadOS or iOS.
The announcement marks Ternus's third major product launch since taking over as chief executive, signaling a faster pace of hardware releases at the company. Ternus himself had previously resisted the touchscreen direction. In a 2021 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he said the Mac was "totally optimized for indirect input" and that Apple hadn't "really felt a reason to change that."
That long-held position now stands reversed — an outcome analysts say is tied partly to the software and developer opportunity Apple sees in the feature. Ryan Reith, IDC's VP for worldwide device trackers, said touchscreens have not historically driven laptop purchasing decisions, with only 17% of notebook PCs shipped globally this year expected to include the feature. Touchscreen notebooks also carry a slightly lower average selling price than their non-touch counterparts, according to IDC data.
"This is really a user interface and software thing," Reith said. "It's one more thing that can draw the developers in."
The launch comes during a difficult stretch for the broader PC market. Overall laptop shipments are expected to fall 11% this year, and total PC shipments dropped 20% year-over-year in the third quarter, according to IDC. Apple's own shipments declined 11% during the same period. Analysts point to an AI-driven global memory shortage as a contributing factor to higher laptop prices, which has weighed on demand across the industry.
Apple has not been insulated from those cost pressures. Former CEO Tim Cook warned this summer that the situation around memory prices was "unsustainable," and nearly all Mac models received price increases this year. Mac Minis introduced in August carried a $300 price bump.
The new MacBook Pro caps a busy two months of releases under Ternus. Apple also introduced updated iMac and MacBook Pro models with M6 chips this week, following price hikes to the broader lineup totaling several hundred dollars in June. Earlier this month the company launched an iPad Mini starting at $699 — $100 more than its predecessor — and in September it released new iPhones, including its first foldable device, the iPhone Duo, along with a smart speaker called HomeView featuring a redesigned version of Siri.
Despite generating far less revenue than the iPhone, the Mac holds strategic weight for Apple. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported $10.35 billion in Mac sales, representing just under 10% of total company revenue. The platform remains the only supported environment for developing iPhone apps, and Apple has increasingly positioned its chips and memory architecture as well suited for local AI workloads that run on-device rather than in the cloud. Meta's AI model development team purchased hundreds of Mac Minis this year to test AI agents, and Apple and Meta jointly announced earlier this month that large, near-frontier AI models can run on clusters of networked Macs connected via high-speed cabling.
Whether the touchscreen feature gains meaningful traction will depend heavily on how Apple adapts macOS and how developers respond — a software challenge that, analysts note, the company has been working toward through years of efforts to align its iPad and Mac experiences.
Jay Goldberg is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering technology, markets, and policy. He files the breaking news and deal coverage that move the publication's core desks.
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